The Boy and the Dead Man
by mangacrack
Summary: It might wreck his plans completely, but he had been a Clan leader before his heirs turned their back on him.


**Notes:** First Naruto fanfiction in this language.

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><p>Madara stares down on the boy, who just set half of the forest on fire. The alliance members had hidden themselves in it and now they running, burning alive or currently chocking in the black smoke in their lungs.<p>

They, him and the boy, do not care.

First of all, they're Uchiha. Their lungs are black since the day they first mastered the great fire jutsu and the continued use just built up resistance and the circulation, which is necessary to clean the lungs again. It has been ages since Madara met another Uchiha last, who had been raised in the Clan, but apparently the secrets of special tea herbs, which nourish the lungs with more dioxygen are still passed down, since the boy in front of him has no trouble with standing in midst of a forest fire. In fact, he's using his eyes quite well in order to foresee how the flames will spread and eat the forest around them.

But, so he sees with his own eyes as well, something is wrong with boy.

His eyes are hunted, they're gleaming with hate and loss and something else that Madara himself hasn't seen in another Uchiha since the days he had been a young clan leader.

Loneliness.

The boy in front of him is an orphan.

There are no Uchiha orphans. There should not be any orphan among the Uchiha.

Parents and elder siblings can get killed, but the Clan exists for such reasons. The Clan head is bound by tradition and honor to their ancestors to adopt every single orphan in the Clan, if there's no-one else who offers to shelter a kinsman.

There 're no Uchiha orphans. Madara knows that.

Expect for some reason an enemy wipes out large parts of the clan and a child gets lost in the seas of blood. His own young years were ruled by the occurrence that they heard rumors of a red eyed child, which often turned out to be another fugitive and survivor of the long and hard years, ever since the Uchiha Clan had been forced to disband in the generation before his own.

There was a reason he was called the founder of the Uchiha Clan. Because it had not been the first the Uchiha had been hunted and in order to survive his grandfather had ordered the family to scatter among the Land of Fire and hide. Hide until the Daimyo and other people power saw them as something else, but fire breathing denizens for the underworld.

It had been him, Madara, who had united the Uchiha again.

It had been him, who stood with his people against the Senju.

The betrayal still hurt, even after a hundred of years. It hurt that the people, who he had sworn to protect, had forgotten how easily their clan could be mistaken for monsters, but apparently they had paid the price with their death and that they didn't deserve, least of all the boy in front of him.

The boy, who looked like as if he was starving for a bit affection and understand after so much betrayal that had drenched his soul in darkness. The fire in the boys had still lived, though. It wanted justice, revenge and blood. It wanted something it could live on.

Madara knew there was no choice.

It might wreck his plans completely, but he had been a Clan leader before his heirs turned their back on him. Before they once again sacrificed the peace Izuna had suffered and died for.

It might by his undoing if he took the boy in now, but Madara knew he didn't have a choice, when he finally jumped down to the boy, who didn't even notice how the fire came close enough to nearly burn his skin.

He could not leave this child here all alone, when he was the only one of his blood left alive.

He could not leave this child, which was so desperate that it threw all caution to the wind and hugged a dead man, who was responsible for its demise in the first place.

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><p><em>I don't think that Madara – the original one – knows about the Uchiha Massacre, but he's too self aware in order to deny his indirect involvement. But since Tobi was supposed to bring him back to life, that might be as bad as it seems. If there's someone who could bring back a whole clan than it's Madara. <em>

_That the Uchiha have been hunted before is just a conclusion I drew from the general narrow minded way of think humanity usually can't get rid of and for a non Shinobi some bloodlines can be pretty scary. Especially if you count in religion, fear of the dead and the underworld and everything else that cannot be easily explain. _

_Also: will it have aftereffects that Kabuto summoned the dead? Usually it's better to "let the dead rest" … who says they will leave again? Itachi certainly didn't dissolve after he got free of the mind control. Technically he's just a dead soul that hunts the word. Will he and the other sealed Edo Tensai summons get exorcised? _

_mangacrack _


End file.
